During White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany's press briefing Thursday, Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst got a shot of her briefing binder, with alphabetized topics on view ranging from "ABSURD" to "WINS."
There were the topics you'd expect and hope to find in a White House briefing book, like COVID and MASKS and CDC, but also some more interesting tabs, like GOYA, MARY (Trump, presumably), (Anthony) FAUCI, STATUES, HATE, LIES, OBAMA, and GOLF. She clearly used some of the tabs on Thursday, like HATCH, in response to a question about the appropriateness of Trump's Rose Garden campaign rally:
And then there were some puzzlers. Does KARL refer to ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl? Karl Rove? Karl Marx? And how about HOGAN. Presumably, that tab was for questions about an op-ed from Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) slamming President Trump's COVID response. But it could also refer to Hogan Gidley, the White House spokesman who now speaks for the Trump campaign, and maybe didn't speak so well in an interview on CNN Thursday afternoon:
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No, it was Larry Hogan.
Make of ABSURD what you will.
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